May 9, 2016 AT 8:00 am

Breakthrough Starshot Aims Aims to Reach Alpha Centauri in 20 Years

The Alpha Centauri star system is 25 trillion miles (4.37 light years) away. With today’s fastest spacecraft, it would take about 30,000 years to get there. The program aims to establish whether a gram-scale nanocraft on a sail pushed by a light beam can fly more than 1,000 times faster.

Lightsail: Advances in nanotechnology are producing increasingly thin and lightweight materials, promising to enable the fabrication of meter-scale sails no more than a few hundred atoms thick and at gram-scale mass.

Light Beamer. The rising power and falling cost of lasers has led to significant advances in light-beaming technology. Phased arrays of lasers (the “light beamer”) could potentially be scaled up to the 100 gigawatt level.